UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
[with video]
William D. Lindsey
Pascal Bonnefoy reports for New York Times yesterday on the video about which I appended a note to Brittie Perez’s great essay, which was shot by an Argentine tourist in St. Peter’s Square last May, and released Friday. As I noted, it shows Pope Francis blaming “leftists” for the uproar that ensued when he appointed Juan Barros bishop of Osorno, Chile, and stigmatizing the people of Osorno as dumb.
Bonnefoy writes,
Many watched in disbelief: There he was, Pope Francis, calling people in Osorno, a city in southern Chile, “dumb” for protesting against a bishop accused of being complicit in clerical sexual abuse.
“The Osorno community is suffering because it’s dumb,” Pope Francis told a group of tourists on St. Peter’s Square, because it “has let its head be filled with what politicians say, judging a bishop without any proof.”
“Don’t be led by the nose by the leftists who orchestrated all of this,” the pope said.
The video, filmed by an Argentine tourist in May, was obtained by a Chilean television station and broadcast Friday, quickly instilling doubts here about the pope’s commitment to protecting victims of sexual abuse.
Bonnefoy quotes Juan Carlos Claret, a spokesman for Osorno’s Lay Organization which has been spearheading protests against Barros because of his close ties to Father Fernando Karadima, a priest who has sexually abused minors (Karadima’s victims allege that Barros covered up and was complicit in Karadima’s abuse): Claret says,
It is the Church of Osorno that is demonstrating; we are not taking orders from political parties. We are now seeing the real face of Pope Francis, and we demand an explanation.
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